The 2016 presidential race has been an absolute circus, and the hoopla surrounding it has taken away from the fact that the presidential election isn’t the only election happening this fall. A fight awaits Republicans seeking office in the House and Senate, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday pointed out a truth that’s dogged Democratic lawmakers for years now: the Democratic Party is completely out of touch with what ordinary Americans want:

Matthews said on his show “Hardball” that the many of the issues the Democratic Party stands for in 2016 are not “well received” by large numbers of Americans.

Matthews said, “I’ve been working on this project about the early elections in the ’50s and ’60s, and the Kennedy races and I have to tell you, back then, being a Democrat was great. You talked about unemployment, you talked about jobs, you talk about putting people to work, you talked about minimum wage, you talked about Medicare.”

“Now you’ve got to talk about guns, which people don’t want to hear,” Matthews lamented. “You got to talk about how coal is bad for the country and bad the world. You talk about same-sex [marriage] in a part of the country that isn’t too keen on that cultural stuff” and “abortion.”

“So all of a sudden, you’re talking about things that aren’t really well received. But in the old day, a Democrat could just say, ‘There’s a lot of poverty here, let’s do something about it.’”

Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway added that, “This is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party.” Indeed, today’s Democratic Party is much further left than it once was, and it’s forgotten all about the very people it used to champion: hardworking blue collar Americans.